The Problem is the Solution

Meditations on Iron John

In January of 1990, I was a college student majoring in English in Washington, DC, also getting an education in esoteric subjects like theosophy, astrology, channeling, world mythology, sufism, and Jungian psychology, through my job as a bookseller at the famed Yes! Bookshop in Georgetown.

Yes! was one of the first esoteric bookstores in the country, and its owners were generously dedicated to educating the staff. We were allowed to check books out and take them home to read, and I have to admit, my favorite task was “shelving” books, because I was somehow paid for spending hours to read tomes that provided me with a parallel education to the one I was receiving in English Lit at GW.

Most of the shop’s clientele was female. Women, recently empowered by the feminist movement, had turned their focus inward and were frequent buyers in the “personal development” section, located right across from the cash register because it was the store’s bestseller. This was before the internet, so if customers were excited by a book, they would call us up and ask us to save a copy when it came out. Usually, this shelf behind the register was filled with new books by female authors like Sondra Ray, Shakti Gawain, Melody Beattie, and Julia Cameron. One by one, customers would come to the front desk and request their new books, walking out of the store onto the streets of Georgetown to discover and explore new avenues and ways of expressing that were beginning to change American culture.

One day I came in for my shift and saw the shelf was not filled with magenta and indigo spines promising enlightenment. Instead, the entire hold shelf had turned brown over night, like a tree stripped of its leaves by a hard frost. The spines of the brown books were printed with four words; Iron John Robert Bly.

As someone with poetic yearnings, I had vaguely heard of Robert Bly, but we had never had a poet take over the hold shelf before. What was going on?

My answer came as the stream of customers pouring in the front door began. These were not the usual customers, women in search of inner expansion. These customers were men! For months they came, including the actor John Cusack who was in town filming a movie. Even though everyone who worked at the store was either a feminist radical, a riot grrrl, or a lesbian, we were all pretty excited by John Cusack. Still, none of us read the book. “A Book About Men,” the subtitle read. Nah, we weren’t interested.

Around 2005, in an unexpected twist of fate that now seems predestined, I picked up a flyer on the book table at the Block Island Poetry Project advertising a conference. Some of my favorite poets like Li-Young Lee were listed as presenters, and there were legendary names like Marion Woodman, Joseph Campbell, and James Hillman. I knew right away I had to go, and a couple of months later, three of us from Block Island headed north to the Maine woods for our first time at Robert Bly’s Conference on the Great Mother and the New Father, the Great Mother Conference for short.

On the first morning of the Conference, I unzipped my tent flap and walked uphill to Innisfree, the barn-like meeting hall where I’d read the night before that “morning singing” would begin at 6:30. As Innisfree filled up with half-asleep dreamers, some greeting each other like old friends, some, newcomers like me, smiling with shyness, or maybe even nervousness, I really didn’t know what to expect. I loved singing, but hadn’t really sang since high school chorus, aside from a few late-night drunken jam sessions. Two handsome men seemed to be the leaders. They didn’t look exactly alike, but enough that I decided they were brothers. They were.

The brothers gathered us in a circle, and as the sun rose higher out of the lake down the hill, began to lead us in singing. There were no instruments besides our human voices. The songs were simple chants and hymns from many cultures and religions. As we sang, I could feel the roomful of strangers and old friends come into coherence. Hearts were opening. Eventually, the brothers invited us to walk around the room and stop here and there and sing directly to someone else. My first time, I wanted to look away. Looking into someone’s eyes and sharing a song was unbearably intimate. I could feel the tears welling, and wanted to run from the barn, but I stayed, and sometimes it got easier. I began to understand the power of impersonal love, that was also deeply personal. I was beheld, and learned to behold others.

That first time, one of the brothers looked in my eyes and sang to me, and I felt like I was being sung to by an angel. A part of me, the part of my heart that had been damaged by men, began to ache. All my cynicism about men quickly turned to longing. Where was the man who would love me while singing into my eyes like an angel? I realized I’d been so crushed by men, I didn’t even believe this was possible anymore.

It took years, but the Great Mother Conference had an enormous role in restoring my heart’s vitality. A lot of that occurred from witnessing the men who attended this Conference year after year.

First of all, these were men who were willing to get up at 6:30 AM and sing while gazing into peoples’ eyes! A first for me. They were also men who were brave enough to weep. I’ve seen many men openly cry without shame there over the years. How did they get like this, I wondered? Many of them were from Minnesota, homeland of the Conference founder, Robert Bly. Maybe, I thought, it was something in the water…

It may have been the water, but what many of them shared, was a deep commitment to healing their own wounds so they could be good men, healthy fathers, husbands, and brothers. They were aware of their own wounds, and of how they’d been wounded by fathers and grandfathers who themselves had been wounded. They were rooted in compassion and deep listening.

How did they become like this?

Many of them also attended another yearly gathering founded by Robert Bly, The Minnesota Mens’ Conference, where they sat in ceremony and council with many of the old fairy tales, but most importantly, with Iron John. They had worked Bly’s book and that fairy tale as a spiritual path and it showed.

Still, I didn’t read the book myself until almost twenty years later. This year, in fact! All this time, I’d been preoccupied with healing my wounded feminine. I identified with female characters like the Handless Maiden and Psyche, whose power had been taken away, not realizing that what I was calling the feminine was actually my masculine. The masculine is the doer inside us, no matter what gender we identify with. The feminine, the Great Mother, is formless. The masculine takes his directions from the feminine. A healthy dialogue between the two is the basis for inspired action that contributes, rather than consumes. Once I realized this, I was finally ready to read Iron John: A Book About Men, when I found a copy at the used bookstore in town.

From what I have gathered from listening to the men who worked with Bly, and from reading Iron John, he presented the story (known as Iron Hans in Grimm) as a story of male initiation by men. This could have been the case in old Europe, but when I read the story from my new perspective of understanding how the internal masculine is designed to function at its best in all genders, I saw that the story could be relatable and useful to all contemporary humans raised in cultures without rites of passage and initiation rituals, as a way to understand where we are in relationship to our own masculine, and also provide us with guides to transmuting the wounds to our masculine so that each one of us can embody and express our purpose as individuals in service to our communities.

Last week, a few days before “grab them by the Pussy,” Donald Trump, who has been publicly accused by 26 women of sexual assault, was re-elected as President of the United States, I published an essay looking into the origins of rape and its perpetuation by the patriarchy from a mythological perspective. (Here’s the link if you want to read it. We are Gisèle: The Rape of Medusa.)

Pondering what happened the day after Trump was re-elected, I remembered a few fevered days 23 years ago, when I barely left the couch because I was so gripped by a book. It was The Book of Seeing With One’s Eyes, by Sharon Doubiago. I was going through a break up with a man who said cruel and degrading things to me in our months-long separation process. Because we couldn’t find housing, we still had to live together. Despite, the way he tried to humiliate me, my heart had not closed to him. I understood where his pain was coming from, some from stories he’d shared, but also just because it’s one of those things I can do. I can see the root. I understand it.

Because of that, I have always had a hard time condemning anyone, or even just separating in a healthy way, because condemnation is not my actual goal. My goal is peace, and I have sacrificed myself in misguided attempts to achieve that too many times, although I suppose it’s just been as many times as I’ve needed to be where I am now, able to offer a clear no when my boundaries are crossed.

There was one line in Doubiago’s book that felt like a fist squeezing my heart. I don’t remember it exactly, and the book has been lost in all my moves, but it came down to this: I’m tired of understanding.

That’s how I feel now. I’m tired of understanding. This doesn’t mean I will stop understanding, or that I will cease to have compassion because I understand. What it means, is my focus will not be on empathy if it leads to collusion that will perpetuate unhealthy relationships and systems. My focus will be on solutions.

And that is what I am offering you here today. Instead of commenting on the election, instead of trying to evoke compassion in the interest of building bridges between polarized individuals and groups, I’m giving you a story, one that speaks to your inner masculine as an individual, ours as a culture, and that shows both how healthy, mature men can assist adolescent men to become wise adults, and how we can contact the parts of our own internal masculine and facilitate this process within ourselves.

My hope is, no matter what gender you identify as, is that you find yourself in this story, and that you take the next step toward the highest expression of your own masculine energy. Maybe you will be the young entitled prince. Maybe you’ll be the caged wild man. Maybe you’ll be the cook who gives the prince-turned-beggar a job. Maybe you’ll be the warrior defending the kingdom. Maybe you’ll be the freed wild man who comes back to help the young man when called. A kind of hairy godfather, instead of fairy godmother. Maybe you’ll see your own golden hair reflected in the spring and know, no matter what pain men have caused on Earth, that the masculine is righteous and good. Maybe some shame you carry will slip off your shoulders and become food for the dark soil.

Have a listen to my telling of Iron John here and please let me know where you find yourself in the story in the comments. I’d love to know.

Listen to my telling of Iron John here

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Resources

Iron John: A Book About Men, Robert Bly, Vintage Books, 1990.

The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, Sharon Doubiago, Graywolf Press, 1988.

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light